


Kevin Flynn: The True Villain of the Legacy Timeline?

by Allronix



Category: Tron (1982), Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types, Tron: Betrayal, Tron: Legacy (2010), Tron: Uprising
Genre: Character Analysis, Essays, Fandom Meta - Freeform, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 22:58:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2043450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allronix/pseuds/Allronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a lot about Kevin Flynn's behavior that adds up more to a case of anti-hero or (come Betrayal and Legacy) something dangerously close to villain. Of course, part of that in Legacy are the writers; Horowitz and Kitiss run entirely on grayscale morality and characters who aren't as clear-cut on the alignment scale as they appear on first pass (just look at OUaT and LOST). Even worse is that the two other main characters of Legacy are his devoted disciple (who was saved by him while millions of others were left to die or worse) and the son who has desperately wanted to find him, characters who likely have a very large blind spot when it comes to his degree of culpability. I figure that the writers were probably intending a more flattering picture than this, but add up these points, and it doesn't look good for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kevin Flynn: The True Villain of the Legacy Timeline?

Another pass on Legacy and another run through the novelization of Tron proper, and something's bothering me. You want to believe the official story; Flynn was a heroic figure who got into the system, fought for a world he didn't understand, made a heroic sacrifice at the end, and miraculously survived. Later, he set out to build a Utopia, a perfect system, and when a beautiful miracle happened, his double became twisted with jealousy, destroying the Isos and trapping his creator in exile, a broken shell of a man. Clu being a complete monster helps. The viewpoint characters being sympathetic helps. It's only after the second or third (or more) watching after running through Betrayal, Evolution, and Uprising that I started going "something's not right. Too much is not adding up. Is that really the whole truth?" Even worse is that the two other main characters of Legacy are his devoted disciple (who was saved by him while millions of others were left to die or worse) and the son who has desperately wanted to find him, characters who likely have a very large blind spot when it comes to his degree of culpability. I figure that the writers were probably intending a more flattering picture than this, but add up these points, and it doesn't look good for him. There's a lot about Kevin Flynn's behavior that adds up more to a case of anti-hero or (come Betrayal and Legacy) something dangerously close to villain.

Of course, part of that in Legacy are the writers; Horowitz and Kitiss run entirely on grayscale morality and characters who aren't as clear-cut on the alignment scale as they appear on first pass (just look at OUaT and LOST). They're also borderline techophobic, as LOST and OuaT are not particularly friendly toward technology and scientific solutions, tilted more towards "magic" and mysticism then logic.  _Legacy_ also has a director who loves the look of technology, but has a deep hatred and fear of its potential. Kosinski's _Oblivion_ treated every piece of post-1985 technology as Always Chaotic Evil, and used the hero's affection for a lower-tech lifestyle as a way to distinguish himself from the corrupted false female lead and as one of the reasons the good guy resistance recruited him. All the better, I suppose, if Kosinski wants to build a _Tron 3_ on the premise that any synthetic lifeform advanced enough to show signs of sentience will inevitably hate and want to destroy its organic creators, an attitude that was given the deconstruction and ridicule it deserved in _Mass Effect_ , and has no place at all in a universe that began with the idea that humans and their creations are little different.

But here's what we have on Kevin Flynn:

 

1\. He's established as a guy who has a natural gift for business, programming, and persuading others to do what he wants (Alan and Lora should have been immune to his bullshit, but look how fast he can rope them into a half-dozen felonies), but is otherwise a full-blown Man Child. His primary motivation on the first film is to get revenge on Dillinger for stealing his ideas and a ton of money. Defeating Master Control is the only way he would be able to get back to analog so he could enjoy the credit and cash. Anyone else's concerns could be a second thought at best.

2\. Even right before he makes his attempt at Heroic Sacrifice, he kisses Yori, a doppelganger for his ex-girlfriend (and who he knows is happily attached to his new Program best friend). It's very obvious he's using her as a substitute for the gal who got away (who is, from a certain POV, her mother), which kinda adds to the squick.

3\. After he does get back to analog, he proceeds to steal his friends' work (Lora's laser, Alan's Program) and conduct highly irregular and dangerous experiments in his arcade's basement, all the while lying to his friends and even his wife about what he's really up to! Seriously, these people are loyal and devoted to him and his cause. Alan keeps the damn pager for 21 years. Roy loses everything just as he's approaching retirement. Lora had explicitly called the laser her “life's work.” Yes, he technically owned it after she left for DC, but wouldn't the ethical or intelligent thing to do be informing the inventor of that laser about his finding? Repeated digitizations could have done God-knows-what to his DNA, but he tells Jordan NOTHING. And after all this, he thinks so little of his friends that he doesn't even trust them with the truth? With a "in case I die or vanish, here's some instructions" sealed envelope in a safe deposit box?

Basic safety and courtesy when it comes to hiking, mountain climbing, or any dangerous sport is to either not be stupid enough to solo it, or be VERY good about leaving an itinerary. Never venture out unannounced, let others know your approximate route and time you plan to be back so that if something goes wrong, Search and Rescue can find you. Every year, a dozen people or more get lost on Mount Rainier, ranging from teenagers on a day hike to veteran climbers. Yes, you can go and do dangerous things alone, but you ALWAYS leave your lifelines open in case shit hits fan. Flynn wasn't dumb. He left his will on the machine and ran a sanity check. He knew the place was dangerous; gridbugs, a lightcycle crash, some evil Program with ideas...anything could have happened, and he had such little faith in his friends that he didn't tell them? The fact he was being stretched thin after Jordan's death just makes it even less excusable that he didn't ask for help.

4\. And what is he doing in cyberspace? Millions of sentient, artificial life forms with their own society, goals, thoughts, and feelings, and he explicitly refers to their world as a "game," and "[his] gift to the world," with little if any consideration for them. He was in love with the idea of the Grid over its reality, and was warned multiple times by multiple Programs that things were not going well, but he blithely ignored their input.

5\. When the Isos come along, he's so delighted by them that the Programs seem secondary concerns at best. When things inevitably go south on him, he saves Quorra (last Iso), but throws millions of Program lives (including Tron's) under the proverbial bus in the process. The Programs were being hunted down and killed by the hundreds, the games twisted to a blood-sport. And seriously? It didn't occur to him to flick the abacus and suspect the horrible truth behind “Rinzler?” He knew about the rectification initiative. He knew what Clu was doing to Programs. And, like magic, after the coup, Clu comes up with this terrifying, lethal champion that was never seen or heard from before that terrible day...he had to have suspected something.

6\. Regarding the Isos. Yes, it was a horrible, evil, Sith-Level monstrosity that Clu committed by inciting hatred against them. The creation of Abraxas and cold murder of Radia just scratched the surface. The Iso Wars, bombing of their cities, mass genocide are even worse. However, the Grid was falling apart from gridbugs, system failures, and capacity issues before the coup (see the Betrayal comic). It went from being on the verge of irrecoverable crash to stable enough to run uninterrupted for nearly 21 years. The other disturbing element was that Flynn was delighted about the Isos, enough and go on and on about how great Isos were, how much of a "miracle" they were, his "gift to the world." The Programs get slapped with a denigrating label of Basics, and Flynn doesn't seem to be interested in them (to the point of possibly throwing them all under the bus, Tron included, just to he could save Quorra and his own ass). But aren't the Programs also miracles? Aren't they also life from nothing with unknown origin? Aren't they also sentient lifeforms with their own social order, dreams, sense of humor? Weren't they also worth respect? Wouldn't even the simplest accounting script like Ram rewrite everything - science, medicine, religion - just as much as an Iso could?

It was argued that, as the last surviving Iso, Quorra was the golden child, the chosen one. But does that really justify saving her life if it means the suffering and death of millions of others? In some regards, that might make things even worse. Okay, you save Joan of Arc, but it means allowing the English to kill every French citizen in a hundred miles. Save one "special" person but let millions suffer, die, and endure fates much worse than death because they aren't "special enough." Would certainly suck to know your God abandoned you to something very horrible because you weren't special enough, and no matter what you said or did, he was still saving his precious one over you and everyone else. Under the circumstances, I'd probably sign on with Clu willingly upon hearing that! I wonder if that wasn't one of Clu's better arguments to turn the population against Flynn, actually.

7\. Flagrant disregard of the Programs' capacity for choice and sentience. In the opening scene of Legacy, he remarks to Sam that he built Clu 2.0 as a "Program that could think, like you and me," implying that most Programs can't.  One of the excerpts from Digital Frontier (http://www.flynnfrontier.com/excerpts.htm) has the passage "Can a digital being manifest free will?...Short answer: No." He then explains that a Program is beholden to the will of the programmer.  He then seems to be discussing Programs as being able to act with intelligence, but the rest of the paragraph clearly indicates he's discussing Isos, not Basics. In Evolution, he raves about the Isos, going "free will - try programming that!"  Unfortunately, this flies in the face of every damn thing in that franchise!

A Program appears to have a hard-coded directive they can't break and don't want to break. The most blatant one is Tron's directive to defend Users, but we also see it in Ram's good-natured (and inappropriate) insurance sales pitch, Beck's compulsion to fix what is broken (including a broken system), etc. However, it's a VERY big jump from mechanic to revolutionary, from actuarial to game warrior, from medic to occupation lieutenant. Through the movies, games, comics, and especially Uprising, we are seeing the Programs act with nothing but free will. They have an entire society that was well-established before Flynn even glanced at a Shiva Laser. While their function and directives appear to be a big part of them, they seem to have plenty of freedom of choice in how they carry it out, a freedom that was all too readily dismissed.

8\. Quorra says he fought against Clu, but there is no evidence of it in TRON: Uprising and his idea of "fighting" in TRON: Evolution was to code up Anon to do battle for him and die to rescue Quorra. We only have the word of his worshipful disciple that he did much of anything but hide with her in a beautiful prison while everything went to hell.

9\. When Sam shows up, the first thing he does is propose a way to get back to analog where they could burn Clu with a couple keystrokes. It would also, as it turns out, be the only safe option for Quorra. But what is Flynn's plan? Trap his son in the shithole world he created for the rest of their lives and foist Quorra off on him.

I know Flynn wasn't a bad man with bad intentions. That would be his digital doppelganger who chose the nastiest way to implement his directive out of rage and jealousy. His crimes are more out of selfishness, stupidity, and carelessness than malice, but that really doesn't excuse things. His boneheaded actions and lack of forethought ruined the lives of every character in the films. Sam will be spending the rest of his life cleaning up after mistakes he never made, always in his dad's shadow without even the option of slumming it in the game department to break free. Quorra has no analog world skills, connections, identity. She's dependent on Sam, who is still not the most reliable or social of guys. Alan and Roy's work was all for nothing. They get the company back (and are going to be cleaning up after Kevin - again), but no answers. All their work in trying to find their friend was for nothing.

And that's just the analog world. No matter how this plays out, Tronzler is a badly injured, mentally-glitched mess. No sign of Yori. Beck and friends likely dead or worse. Millions of Program lives lost. The Isos destroyed. Entire cities burned, the Grid with no leadership whatsoever (if Tessler survived, he's most likely to step up to the power vacuum) . And much of the blame has to lain at the feet of a character who is supposed to thought of as a hero

Rebuttal? Additions to the list of disturbing behavior? Something I missed?


End file.
